Children spell love…T-I-M-E

Children spell love…T-I-M-E.

Dr Anthony P. Witham

 

Children are resilient.  They can learn to cope with just about anything including effective abandonment by their parents.  You mightn’t even realise that this is what’s happening with your kids.  Our culture is doing a fairly good job of brainwashing adults into believing that children are somewhat unpleasant and obnoxious little creatures who have tones of attitude and disrespect their elders as a matter of course.

I don’t believe it for a second.

Having effectively abandoned its children, our culture has now decided against taking responsibility for that and furthermore, has decided to berate children for the ways in which they’ve learned to cope with their abandonment.

Remember those three children on the train that I blogged about last week?  The eldest (an 8-year old boy) had already learned to cope with his mother’s lack of presence by withdrawing into a virtual world of his own.  He didn’t say a word to his mother or his siblings on the whole journey.

Apparently in Japan, there are more than a million young people living lives of total isolation, connected only to the illusory virtual world of the world wide web.

But once we’ve recognised the problem there can be hope.  Because the solution is really simple.  The solution is TIME.  And we can overcome this problem of our children having too little of our time one little step at a time.

We can start to make choices that put children in the heart of our lives.  I recently read that children ought to be “in the centre” of families; not “the centre” but IN the centre.  I really liked that.

So I know it’s not a choice available to everyone, but when I realised the effects of full-time work on our family I made the decision to quit and become a full-time-stay-at-home mom.

And in our family today we take a lot of difficult decisions that the pre-kids me (even the early post-kids me!) would never have believed.  For example, I used to think parents who didn’t have babysitters were insane.  Today I respect that choice.  It’s not for me – we have a babysitter and a back-up babysitter!  But then again, my mother (and mother-in-law) don’t live in the same country as me.

Remember: Children Need Time.  They need time with their parents.  And not just quality time; they need quantity time too.  After all, children spell love, T-I-M-E.